what is the purpose of self certificate? - winforms

Question

i have developed a winform application in VS 2010 using c#.
Created setup and now faced "publisher unknown" situation when starting the application.
Then came to know that need to sign the application with digital certificate. But i am so confused with creating the certificate. I saw that we can create self certificates using makecert,cert2spec tools.
While creating the certificate i got a link by googling that saying "If you use a test (self-created) certificate, the installation dialogs will display an "Unknown publisher" message".
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff699202.aspx
So actually what is the purpose of self certificate creation.
Pls help me to understand ths. I am new to this topic and correct me if have done anything wrong.
Thank You.

Answer 1

There's quite a good explanation on this page:
You can create your own signing certificate with Visual Studio (check
out the Signing tab, and that button that says “Create Test
Certificate”) or using a program called MakeCert. When you do this,
the trust dialog says the publisher is unknown. If you purchase a
certificate, the trust dialog will list your company as the publisher.
The certificate vendor basically guarantees that you are who you say
you are.
My company (GoldMail) uses ClickOnce to deploy our application from a
content delivery network to our customers, The Public. We did not want
our deployment to say “Unknown Publisher”; we wanted it to say
“Published by: GoldMail”. This gives our customers a warm cozy feeling
when installing our application from the internet, and provides
reassurance that it is coming from our company and not from some guy
living in the frozen tundra hacking deployments for fun.
If your application is going to be deployed internally, you might
choose to forego the cost of a purchased certificate, because people
would know where the application was coming from even if it didn’t
specify that on the installation dialogs. You can also choose to
install the test certificate on each user’s machine, and the trust
dialog will then show the name on the certificate as if it were one
purchased from a vendor.
You also might want to use a test certificate if you are deploying
your application for specific customers who know you and know the
application is coming from you, like if you are writing shareware, or
creating an application for your friends and family to use to keep
track of what you want for your birthday and Christmas.

Answer 2

Well, a Self Signed Certificate is the root certificate by which you can create child certificates, and those child certificates are authenticated against the self sign certificate, being self signed means that it holds its private key by which it was created.
For instance, when you want to use a certificate on a web site and also you want to have it verified by an authentication issuer, you ask an issuer like verisign in order to get a certificate. So when a user enters your site by https it will recognise that you own a certificate, and the way to verify that the certificate corresponds to your organization is by checking it against verisign certificate.
You can create self-signed certificates to emulate the production environment, what you will be doing is faking verisigns responsibility.